KABC
KABC-TV, channel 7, is an ABC owned-and-operated television station licensed to Los Angeles, California, United States. The station is owned by the ABC Owned Television Stations subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company. KABC-TV maintains studios and offices on Circle Seven Drive in Glendale, California, and its transmitter is located on Mount Wilson. In the few areas of the western United States, where an ABC station's over-the-air signal is not receivable, KABC-TV is available on satellite television through DirecTV. History Channel 7 first signed on the air under the callsign KECA-TV on September 16, 1949. At the same time, it was the last television station licensed to Los Angeles operating on the VHF band to sign on, and the last of ABC's five original owned-and-operated stations to make its debut (after San Francisco's KGO-TV, which signed on four months earlier). It was also the last of the Los Angeles "classic seven" TV stations to sign on (all of them were originally on the VHF dial, prior to the 2009 digital conversions). In addition, it was the last new Los Angeles TV station to sign on from 1949 until 1962 when the first two UHF Los Angeles stations launched (they were KIIX KWHY-TV and KMEX-TV, channels 22 and 34, respectively). The station's callsign was named after Los Angeles broadcasting pioneer Earle C. Anthony, whose initials were also present on channel 7's then-sister radio station, KECA (790 AM, now KABC), which had served as the Los Angeles affiliate of the NBC Blue Network. Anthony's other Los Angeles radio station, KFI, was aligned with the NBC Red Network. The Red Network survived the split of the two NBC radio networks ordered by the Federal Communications Commission in 1943. Edward J. Noble, who bought the Blue Network (beginning its transformation into ABC), purchased KECA radio a year later when the FCC forced Anthony to divest one of his Los Angeles radio stations. On February 1, 1954, KECA-TV changed its callsign to the present-day KABC-TV. From the time of its initial sign-on in 1949, channel 7 was located at the ABC Television Center (now called The Prospect Studios), on Prospect Avenue in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, east of Hollywood. In December 2000, KABC-TV moved from the Los Feliz studios to a new state-of-the-art facility designed by César Pelli in nearby Glendale, as part of the Disney Grand Central Creative Campus (GC3), on the site of the former Grand Central Airport. The station is currently located four miles east (along the corridor of the Los Angeles River and State Route 134) of ABC's West Coast headquarters on the Walt Disney Studios lot in Burbank. KABC-TV has used the Circle 7 logo since 1962 (the same year ABC created and implemented its current logo), and augmented its bottom left quadrant with the ABC network logo in 1997. The station's news anchors and reporters wear Circle 7 lapel pins when they appear on camera, a practice that had once been standard at each of the original five ABC-owned stations. In 1984, KABC-TV became the first West Coast television station to air 'Stereo audio' for the 1984 Summer Olympics. On February 4, 2006, KABC-TV became the first television station in the state of California to broadcast its local newscasts in high definition using HD cameras in the studio. Along with the in-house upgrades, the station debuted an updated news set and theme music (Gari Media Group's Eyewitness News). In July 2010, The Walt Disney Company became engaged in a carriage dispute with Time Warner Cable (the first such incident since a 2000 dispute that pulled ABC's owned-and-operated stations from the cable provider using the stations as leverage for carriage of Toon Disney and Soapnet, and basic cable carriage of the Disney Channel, which had been carried as a premium channel at the time). This dispute involved KABC-TV and three other ABC owned-and-operated stations, Disney Channel and the ESPN family of networks. If a deal was not in place, all of the Disney-owned channels would have been removed from Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks systems across the United States. The Walt Disney Company and Time Warner Cable reached a long-term agreement to keep the stations and their sister cable channels on Time Warner Cable and its co-managed systems on September 2, 2010. In October 2015, the station debuted a new news set which utilizes two wide format displays and four flat panel screens. Along with the physical upgrades, the station also debuted a new graphics package, which is also used by sister stations KFSN (Fresno, CA) and KGO-TV (San Francisco) Gallery Category:ABC Affiliates Category:Channel 7 Category:1949 Category:Television channels and stations established in 1949 Category:Los Angeles Category:California Category:Disney/ABC Category:VHF Category:Former NTA Film Network affiliates Category:ABC California Category:Former DuMont Affiliates Category:1954 Category:Live Well Network Affiliates Category:Laff Affiliates